My partner and I recently returned from a road trip through Cali and were absolutely shocked by the societal issues in San Francisco.
You’d be walking down a built up high street which would, all of a sudden, turn into a tented area full of people with terrible mental health and drug problems.
It seemed to us that the big issue is a lack of any medical care which exasperates the underlying issues brought about by homelessness. We were terribly saddened by what we saw.
I couldn’t even begin to fathom how you would fix such a complex problem without the involvement and empathy of the whole country.
Even if you figured out a solution to the local issue it would only last so long as people would (rightly so) travel in from other states/cities due to a lack of working solution where they are from originally. And then you would end up back at square 1 when your local solution’s resources have been depleted.
One homeless man I spoke to told me that he ventured to San Francisco in order to get HIV medication as he was unable to get it in his home state, for whatever reason.
That alone highlighted the need for a nationwide plan which would align all state governments. Without a federally mandated baseline of care for these people I feel as though this type of issue will persist.
And I think that the keyword in all of this is _people_. We often forget that that is what they are. They had hopes, they had dreams, they have just been forgotten and are now labelled as a ‘problem’ opposed to a ‘person’.
You’d be walking down a built up high street which would, all of a sudden, turn into a tented area full of people with terrible mental health and drug problems.
It seemed to us that the big issue is a lack of any medical care which exasperates the underlying issues brought about by homelessness. We were terribly saddened by what we saw.
I couldn’t even begin to fathom how you would fix such a complex problem without the involvement and empathy of the whole country.
Even if you figured out a solution to the local issue it would only last so long as people would (rightly so) travel in from other states/cities due to a lack of working solution where they are from originally. And then you would end up back at square 1 when your local solution’s resources have been depleted.
One homeless man I spoke to told me that he ventured to San Francisco in order to get HIV medication as he was unable to get it in his home state, for whatever reason.
That alone highlighted the need for a nationwide plan which would align all state governments. Without a federally mandated baseline of care for these people I feel as though this type of issue will persist.
And I think that the keyword in all of this is _people_. We often forget that that is what they are. They had hopes, they had dreams, they have just been forgotten and are now labelled as a ‘problem’ opposed to a ‘person’.